weddings and grammar musings

Thaddeus and Dana's wedding is in two weeks, and I still don't have any good ideas about what to get them. He's a professional-grade chef, so I wouldn't presume to guess about kitchen toys. She's been married once before, so she probably already has a bunch of the stereotypical stuff. They've been living together for 5 years already, so I'm betting they have all the usual household stuff. They aren't registered anywhere.

I know Thaddeus from years in the SCA, though they're fairly inactive now. (I've met Dana but don't really know her.) Still, maybe the thing to do is to arrange for two sets of custom ceramic feast gear (I know an excellent artist who did a custom seder plate for me a few years back) and let them pick what they want. So if they want something SCA-suitable then fine, and if not they can get something mundane. I prefer to give people actual gifts rather than vouchers, but I also prefer that people actually like and be able to use what I get them. :-)

What is the proper way to punctuate [X and Y]'s wedding, anyway? "X and Y's" strikes me as fundamentally incorrect ("wedding" should bind equally to X and Y), but "X's and Y's" looks a bit funny too, probably because it subtly implies two nouns rather than one.

music stuff

On the Mark had a practice today. (Since Andrea moved to central PA we've been limited to alternate weekends. I prefer Sundays, but that didn't work for someone this time.) We're going to be performing at an SCA event in November (gotta find out how long our slot is -- I think 20 minutes' worth of material is safe but should make sure), and then at an SF convention (Darkover) on Thanksgiving weekend. I've been going to Darkover since, I think, 1984, and OTM has been performing there since 1991. Maybe one of these days I'll actually read a Darkover book. :-)

I try to make sure we always have some new material for Darkover, because most people there are regulars and we actually have a fan base there. Lately we've been working on "Rasputin's HMO" (thanks, Ralph), which is going well. I still have to write (or adapt) a bridge to play on the bowed psaltery; the one the Austin Lounge Lizards do is way too complex for that instrument and my skill level. This'll be fun.

We also started working today on a new arrangement of an old classic not heard much lately, "Biotech Fantasy". ("We've got an animal liberationist in our lab... in a cage behind the storage shelves in room 117..." :-) ) Heather Rose Jones, the author, used to work in the biotech/pharmacuticals world; can you tell?

A friend of ours wrote a song (on September 12) called "We Stand" that is about sticking together and (secondarily) vengeance. Robert (who is very much the pacificist, BTW) and I really like the song, but one of the other group members vetoed it in its current form. Bummer.

I have got to get around to writing music for Yaakov'e poem "Sisera's Mother". I promised to do that ages ago. (I want to do it. The muse just isn't speaking to me. Grr.)

art

I'm drawing the cover for an upcoming SCA newsletter. (It's a special edition of our local newsletter -- all articles, no bureaucratic stuff.) I hope to finish it, or at least get most of the way there, tomorrow. The major stuff is all pencilled in, except for some stuff that requires drafting skills that I'm too tired to try to conjure up tonight. So tomorrow I'll do those, fill in some fiddly bits, and, I hope, ink. (It's a black-and-white cover, so I don't need to paint.) I didn't plan far enough ahead to scare up someone whose calligraphy doesn't suck to letter in the title and stuff; I think I'll do my bad calligraphy on a separate piece of paper and invite the editor (whose calligraphy is better than mine) to plug in her own if she likes.

When it's all done I'll scan it in. So you guys will actually see it before the editor does. :-)